


Vans and Tangled Wires

by starmanspaceboy



Series: Rolodexes [1]
Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Author is a psychologist i promise i didn't pull symptoms out of my ass ok, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Extrajudicial CIA Soccer Mom Van, Found Family, Gen, I promise this ends sort of happy, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Religious Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Canon, Religious Discussion, i haven't been able to think of anything else ever since, maxwell has a restraining order on her family, nobody in this fic is okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-26 21:21:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30112218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starmanspaceboy/pseuds/starmanspaceboy
Summary: Maxwell is learning, slowly but surely, not to panic every time something reminds her of her childhood. Sitting in the back of a van and trying to read is one of these somethings.
Relationships: Daniel Jacobi & Warren Kepler & Alana Maxwell
Series: Rolodexes [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2215878
Comments: 1
Kudos: 13





	Vans and Tangled Wires

Alana doesn't speak as her mother turns up the volume on the car speakers. She's memorized all the songs, everyone in the car has, but it always feels like her parents are the only ones who truly enjoy it. Contrary to popular belief, hymns are  _ not  _ a popular choice amongst the youth in the year 2000. They had once been a bit of a comfort; the soft-sung, languid sound of layered voices smoothing over her anxiety with the memories of once being held. But those memories have long since faded and the words have begun to feel more like a threat and less like a reassurance over the years as she's grown further into her role as the familial disappointment. 

"What a lovely song," her mother says with the sort of warmth she's never used to describe any of her children. The woman in question pulls up to the intersection before turning in her seat as if to speak. When the greying matriarch of their little quiverfull speaks, the brood listens, even if only to avoid the scrutinizing of their father. 

Alana, to her credit, even looks up from the book in her lap, holding the pages with her fingers.

"It is so,  _ so  _ important that you truly hide these words in your heart." The woman has painted on the same smile she uses when teaching Sunday School. Disarming, Alana Then the woman sighs, looks to the floor of the van before speaking again in the general direction of her children. “The return of Christ is coming, it’s coming soon. But before he returns we will face such tribulation, faced with persecution jus-”

Reverend Maxwell lightly taps her shoulder; a sign that the lights have turned green. She turns back in her seat with practiced grace, pivoting only to watch the children through the rear-view mirror. 

“Faced with persecution just as in the days of Christ,” she continues. Her husband remains silent as he looks out the window to the open fields of nothing that exist on either side of the road. “And in those days, all you will have are the words of God that you have learned, coming to you when you need them most.” 

This exact scene has played out in Alana’s life more times than she could possibly count but it has never, not once, incited the urgency in Alana that she knows is expected of her. She glances around the car to measure the enthusiasm of its occupants. Her brother Josh sits in the back with her, texting without looking as he pretends to pay attention to his mother’s spiel. Between them and their parents are four perfectly attentive little girls in their Sunday best, all lace socks and soft dresses. 

She can probably afford to pay a little less attention. Carefully, without so much as the tiniest sound of a page turn, Maxwell re-opens her book. 

“We learn these things from our parents, which is why  _ obedience  _ is Godliness,” her mother continues as the fields go by and Josh texts his girlfriend all manner of clearly ungodly things and the good little women in the front listen to the parable with rapt attention. “God commands us to train up our children in the way they should go, even when it’s hard. This is why parents sometimes make decisions that hurt, because they’re what’s best for our children. ‘ _ Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell’.” _

_ If heaven is filled with people like you, I’d rather rot.  _ She looks down to her book and then back up to the front seat. Her parents don’t seem to have noticed. 

_ ‘There are two kinds of mind: the one geometrical, and the other what may be called the imaginative (de finesse),’ _ she reads silently in her head. She’d been working on something, one could say. Something that would get her accused of playing God if only her parents knew. The teachers sort-of knew. They knew enough to hand her this book, give her a pat on the head for her ambitions, and leave her alone in the school computer lab for as many recesses as she was willing to sacrifice.

‘ _ The former is slow, rigid, and inflexible in its views, but the latter has a suppleness of thought which fastens at once upon the various pleasing qualities of what it loves. From the eyes it goes to the heart itself, and from the expression without it knows what is passing within. When we have both kinds of mind combined, how mu-” _

“Alana, are you listening?” 

Her head snaps up suddenly, eyes wide. “Yup.”

She watches through the mirror as her father raises a brow, takes in a breath. “What did your mother just say?” he asks. 

_ Crap. _

Her mother had a mental Rolodex of parenting verses, and the order tended to go rather predictably. Proverbs, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Ephesians, Romans. Maxwell had memorized the order, even memorized the explanations that came in between. 

“Uhh. It’s...It’s about honoring one’s father and mother,” Alana supplies, just a tinge too quickly to be inconspicuous.

His lips press into a thin line and the “hmm” he returns to her feels like a threat. Attention on her book gone, Alana just tries to focus on breathing. 

“That is the general topic of her talk, yes. But what was the last verse?” 

Alana picks at a dried little ketchup stain on the edge of her seat as she tries to think of what the most likely answer to that question could be. Her mother often took her sweet time going through each verse and Alana had only just returned to her book so…

“ _ ‘ _ _ Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right’ _ ,” Maxwell answers. It takes genuine effort to keep the tremor out of her voice. 

He raises both brows this time, resting his hand on his wife’s shoulder and, for the briefest of moments, Maxwell almost thinks she’s in the clear. But then he speaks. “My dear, could you repeat the last verse you quoted?”    
  
Her mother’s smile is tense now, warmth gone as she speaks. “Certainly,” she says with a kiss to his cheek. “‘ _ And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice’ _ .”

_ Oh god oh god oh god. _

Tears form pressure behind her eyes but she  _ refuses  _ to cry in the van, in front of them. So instead she focuses on trying not to shake in the backseat, on trying to control her breath, on trying to steady her voice before she responds. She tries not to think of whatever punishment awaits her once she arrives at home but it sits at the edge of her mind anyways, tinging every thought that manages to get through the panic.

A breath, slow intake, held for a second just as the school counselor had taught her a few weeks back. She finally speaks on the exhale. 

"I'm sorry," is all she can really manage. 

The old ketchup stain is nearly entirely gone from the surface of the van. 

"And  _ what  _ are you sorry for?" Her father presses. She can't pick out his level of anger from his tone. She can't pick out how badly she's screwed up. It's just steady all the way through. No screaming or hand-waving or modulation of tone and in the back of the car, it's this fear of the unknown that truly sparks panic .

_ In for four. Hold for seven. Out for eight.  _

She barely holds for five and she definitely can't exhale for eight. 

"I'm sorry for not paying attention, sir." She mimics the smoothness of his voice and hopes to God she manages it. 

Her father nods, contemplative as he returns his attention to the window. Quietly, as if she were not meant to hear it, he replies. 

"We'll discuss this at home."

_ We'll discuss this at home.  _ The words rattle around her head for the rest of the car ride, rattle around her head all the way out the car and into church. She tries not to think of them but the attempt at avoidance just makes them more prominent and so she redirects her energy into bouncing her leg as she sits near the back during services. The rest of her energy is redirected towards not crying at church. 

* * *

“Maxwell, are you listening?” 

Her head snaps up suddenly and she shuts the book in her hands with little regard for what page she was on. The spine of the book is comforting as her thumb traces over the imprinted lettering, worn down from literal decades of reading and anxiety in the back of a van. She takes a breath, holds it, and for those seven whole seconds she’s not sitting in the back of a van reading Pascal to pass the time as the two idiots up front take turns driving through the Colorado wilderness. 

Kepler turns in his seat with the same smooth movement as her mother once had. “ _ Maxwell. _ ”

“Yes, sir?” she responds on impulse. 

Kepler smiles, slow and cold in a way that Maxwell is only just starting to fully understand and only with  _ immense  _ effort and Jacobi’s constant assistance. “ _ Doctor  _ Maxwell, what is it you’d like for dinner?”

It’s only then that she actually notices where they are: a drive-through surrounded by mountains with the sun just on the edge of setting. She’d probably find it beautiful if she weren’t on the edge of full-blown panic only a few minutes earlier. 

She says the first thing that comes to mind. 

“Fries. And, uh, coffee.” 

Pascal calls to her and so she returns her attention to the book in her hands, flipping to a random page that she has no doubt just short of memorized and missing Kepler’s raised brow in the process. She doesn’t have to look, though. She’s seen that expression more times than she can count and for longer than she can remember. 

“Coffee? At this hour? Maxwell-”

Jacobi pats Kepler’s shoulder with mock affection before r eaching back to ruffle her hair in that annoying way he often did . “Don’t question the caffeine addiction, sir. Robots don’t sleep like the rest of us.”

She ducks out from under his hand, shoots Jacobi a glare but it’s all in jest. “Fuck off.”

Somehow, that’s enough to calm her. The dynamics are just different enough to break her out of whatever terror her mind conjured back up from the depths of her memory.  Jacobi’s blatant sarcasm, the teasing, the way he talks back to Kepler. The way they both do, really.  All things that would never fit in the context of her tormenting memory of the day. Despite the much slower heart rate, she takes another breath, just in case. 

She’ll probably drink tonight. Sit with Jacobi on the edge of the bed in some musty old hotel room. They’ll pretend to go over tomorrow’s plans and pretend to be very involved in whatever stupid side quest they’ve been sent on this week. They’ll pass a bottle between them until it’s empty and they’re both just staring at the ceiling,  pulling apart the wires in their heads until there’s nothing left to reveal because that’s what friendship is, she thinks . It’ll hurt, she’ll cry and, likely, so will Jacobi, but emotional reboots like this always hurt. They’ll both feel better for it in the morning. Like cleaning the environment of useless objects before executing one’s code, they were wiping their memories clean with as strong of booze as they could tolerate before having to go into the field and make potentially life-or-death choices.

But for now, she’s okay. She’s okay with the book that waxes poetic about the human condition, with the man who has essentially become a brother, and with the hot coffee Kepler hands her with nothing but a  “knock yourself out, kid.” She’s temporarily at peace with the cluttered workspace of her mind because she’s learned to keep certain elements at the forefront after  _ years  _ of work. 

“Now _ Jacobi _ , we’ve listened to Pearl Jam for the last forty minutes,” Kepler says, still all fake-cheeriness. “And I won’t listen to it for another forty.”

Elements like these idiots, for better or for worse.

Kepler yanks the aux cord out of Jacobi’s phone with the hand that isn’t currently driving their van. Jacobi tries to yank it back, but Kepler raises his arm too quickly, keeping it just out of reach like a preschool teacher holding a toy just out of a toddler’s hand.  Jacobi could grab it, but they’re on an open road, and…if they’re being honest…Kepler is petty enough to do something dire in order to get his way. 

Maxwell reaches under the console between Kepler and Jacobi and plugs her phone in instead. It’s the sort of nonsense, the sort of self-assured defiance that she  _ knows  _ she can get away with, that she’s never really gotten away with before. But somehow the man who could kill her (and has threatened to kill her) just sighs in defeat.

“I refuse to listen to forty minutes of country  _ or _ Pearl Jam,” she explains between sips of coffee.

Jacobi turns in his seat, hands on either side of the headrest as he mouths “thank you” rather indiscreetly before a backdrop of mountains and electronica. Maxwell just snorts in return.  They’re almost alright, much more alright than they once were and, despite being impossibly broken people, she’ll take this shitty little van and their horrible drive-through coffee and their ancient cheap motels over what she once had.  She used to have an idea of what family was, had assumed it was what everyone else thought of too. People you were born to, who mapped out your life long before you were born and kept you in check, feelings be damned. But as she fixes her Jacobi-ruffled hair and watches the men upfront bicker, she wonders if this could be it too:  a couple of broken losers driving around the country to commit workplace-sanctioned crimes and fighting over the music choices along the way.  She wonders if it could be Roomba fights on the apartment floor and actually talking about one’s feelings with another living, caring being. It could be the occasional genuine smile and accompanying “good work, Maxwell.” And yes, it could be the teasing and the nicknames and the shouting and the desperate beg that she eat a singular vegetable for once in her life. It could be that.

Maxwell returns to her book, battered through years but still here, still hers, and a few of the frazzled wires in her head uncross. There’s an inhale, an exhale. She’s  _ almost  _ alright.

**Author's Note:**

> The alternative title of this fic is Maxwell Panicking in Kepler's CIA Mom Van. The title of the goddamn google doc is Vans Are Cancelled. I take my emotional support fics and my own childhood very seriously, as you can tell.
> 
> Also, the work referenced is Pascal's Discourse on the Passion of Love because in my squishy little heart I'm still a cogsci/AI dev nerd (and a would-be android fucker).


End file.
